Body Turn to Rain

THE BOOK: Body Turn to Rain: New & Selected Poems

PUBLISHED IN: 2017

THE AUTHOR: Richard Robbins

THE PUBLISHER: Lynx House Press

SUMMARY: This collection brings together selections from five previous books of poems and features forty pages of previously unpublished work.

WHY THIS TITLE: The title is from a poem that was not eventually included in the book. That phrase seemed to be in the spirit of the collection, however, with its suggestion of merging the self with the world.

WHY SOMEONE WOULD WANT TO READ IT: The poems are image-driven, located, often narrative, and strive to be plain-spoken.

REVIEW COMMENTS:

“It is conceptual freshness, and a beautiful instinct for emergent shape, that makes this poetry radioactive. Robbins can spin a hitherto undiscovered cosmos out of a single, wayward proposition, but he never loses footing in the radiant, mortal, given world. Richest invention is tempered by submission to the textures of material and social and ethical life. What more can one ask of a book of poems?”―Linda Gregerson

“The poems are grounded in the geography of the American west―iots seasons, its people, its destruction―and lifted by the music Robbins coaxes out of the language. They reveal a sympathy with nature and a passion for humane awareness in a culture which often seems to tell us merely to consume and, “Be happy you know nothing.”―William Trowbridge

AUTHOR PROFILE: Richard Robbins studied as an undergraduate at San Diego State University and as a graduate student at the University of Montana with the poets Richard Hugo and Madeline DeFrees. He has published six books of poems. He’s received awards and fellowships from the McKnight Foundation, The Minnesota State Arts Board, The Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, The National Endowment for the Arts, and The Poetry Society of America. He currently lives in Mankato, Minnesota.

SAMPLE: (Provide link).

Old Country Portraits

My lost sister used to try the trick

with the tablecloth, waiting until

the wine had been poured, the gravy boat filled,

before snapping the linen her way

smug as a matador, staring down

silver and crystal that would dare move,

paying no mind to the ancestor gloom

gliding across the wallpaper like clouds

of a disapproving front—no hutch

or bureau spared, no lost sister sure

the trick would work this time, all those she loved

in another room, nibbling saltines,

or in the kitchen plating the last

of the roast beef. How amazed they would be

to be called to the mahogany room

for supper, to find something missing,

something beautiful, finally, they could

never explain, the wine twittering

in its half-globes, candles aflutter, each

thing in its place, or so it seemed then,

even though their lives had changed for good.

God Particles

They show up after a death, arranging a face on The Shroud.

They make the waterfall fall.

They make the shine in Whitman’s eye, the flies in orbit around the hungry.

Under the Alps, they lose the recent race to protons.

They make grilled peach halves over strawberry, the drizzle of honey.

They make that hand, one finger over another.

Under the Alps, they make the six-legged horse just over a rise, coming this way, bearing down.

When the Other Man Asked Him Did He Pray

He kept driving, each storefront a shoulder-to-shoulder forest he couldn’t see around.

All those miles down the boulevard, numbers counting down by twos.

And the field opening where the buildings end, and light settling over the lengthening eye.

And wind across the tops of bluestem and the lives of insects.

And all animals in the grass, even birds, moving in their own ways under the sun.

And on the horizon, something like his shadow walking, something small as a daytime star against the blue moving up

LOCAL OUTLETS: Powells Books, Lynx House Press website.

WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT: Amazon.

PRICE: $19.95

CONTACT THE AUTHOR: richard.robbins@mnsu.